Andre van der Hoek wrote:
> Both provide a speedup that can be quite considerable, and both might be
> needed for everything to really work (consider that 1 meg image where I
> change one pixel, compressing helps, but boy, I would rather send the
> diff!).
There may be a snag here: if the image is compressed (as it probably is), then a
diff on the bitstreams may not be all that small, since changing that pixel may
change much/all of the downstream data.
One possibility would be to permit type-specific diffs; if you make small changes
in an image, you can send a diff that says "patch the image by changing this
region", sort of like the interframe compression in MPEG. Similarly, if you've
got a compiled Mac application under versioning, and you change a single string
resource, you could send a diff that says, "change 'STR ' resource 1717 to
'foo'".
I'm not sure I'm actually advocating this approach; the complexity might not be
worth the bandwidth savings. I would certainly not advocate putting any
type-specific diffs into the required protocol; I would say make each diff format
a negotiable extension.
--
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